E.ON’s CO2 Pipeline Plans from the New Kingsnorth

Village Voices is a community newsletter for Hoo and Chattenden sponsored by E.ON and, as you would expect, often contains a PR piece about Kingsnorth.

The current issue (June/July 2010) of Village Voices describes how “plans for a carbon dioxide (CO2) pipeline from the proposed new cleaner coal-fired [are they moving away from the phrase “clean coal”?] Kingsnorth power station to the North Sea have been progressing since E.ON submitted environmental scoping reports to Medway Council in March.”

Exisiting Kingsnorth Power Station

E.ON’s plans are part of a vision for Kingsnorth to be the gateway to carbon capture and storage (CCS) development in the UK, enabling the future development of a CCS cluster in the south-east.

Ed Walker, E.ON’s project development manager, believes their plans for Kingsnorth represent the best opportunity to provide industrial scale evidence of the viability of CCS and the role it could play in meeting the UK’s future energy needs. There are just a few problems with Mr. Walker’s belief and here are some examples:

even if you accept the need for CCS with fossil fuels, surely the best way to provide evidence of its viability is to retrofit it to an existing plant? After all, we keep hearing how important existing plants are to the world’s energy needs and how they must stay in use so need CCS;

the government expects its CCS demonstrations to last 10-15 years (capturing only about 25% of the CO2 for a 1,600MW power station) and, in a 2006 press release, E.ON stated it expected first power to be produced in four to five years – assuming E.ON started construction in 2010, it would be 2024-2030 before the possibility of “proving” CCS works but the report Zero Carbon Britain 2030 – A New Energy Strategy shows how we can be zero carbon (without using CCS with fossil fuels) by 2030;

Our Kingsnorth blog referred to above also provides a short list of issues with CCS (not least of which is the fact that to deal with climate change, the CO2 will need to be stored for thousands of years and how can demonstrations lasting 10-15 years prove storage is safe for thousands of years?)